In Azkend 2 HD – The World Beneath, you play as an explorer aboard a ship that hits some tough chop. Before you know it, you’re sucked into a typhoon and get lost. Eventually, you find yourself in a mysterious jungle, presumably buried somewhere under the sea and preserved from man and time. You begin exploring and find marvelous jungles, volcanoes, and mountains. Bugs and other animals, never before seen by man, can be found everywhere. The beautiful, mysterious world of Azkend is yours to explore and document. And did we mention this was a puzzle game?

Yeah, Azkend 2 surprised us, as well. You’re greeted with romantic music and hand-painted scenery when the game opens. A delightful female voice narrates your trek and various dilemmas. From the very beginning, it is clear that this is not your ordinary puzzle game.

Clearing the fog.

The actual puzzles themselves are atypical, as well. What originally appears to be a game of matching tiles quickly becomes a game of strategy and luck. Each board is laid out similarly, with six-sided tiles decorated with various artifacts on them arranged in a honeycomb-like pattern. By using your finger to connect the tiles, you can remove them from the board, causing the remaining tiles above to move down. You must connect at least three tiles with the same image on them, but connecting at least six will unleash a ball of lightning

The ball of lightning is only the tip of the iceberg. There are two types of power-ups in the game to help you solve the tile puzzles quicker: active and passive powers. These power-ups are based on items that you recover by solving other puzzles. For example, you must find several sticks of dynamite. The dynamite is recovered by getting the dynamite tile in a puzzle to the bottom by clearing the tiles below it. Once you’ve recovered the dynamite, dynamite tiles will appear. Matching at least three of these tiles will result in an explosion, clearing nearby tiles.

Passive powers, also based on items you find in the story, aid you without having to be activated. Eyeglasses, for example, will show you nearby tiles you can clear. You can choose which active and passive power-ups you would like to use, but you can only have one of each selected. As you move further into the game, more power-ups will become available.

Day of the tentacle.

Azkend 2 does a great job of guiding you easily into the puzzles, starting out with a simple matching game. As you progress, you’ll have more to do than just matching. By connecting similar tiles, you will change the color of the space beneath the tile. At some point, you’ll need to change all of these spaces to the same color. You’ll also need to thaw tiles that are frozen by matching nearby tiles. While this may all sound overwhelming, it is a smooth transition.

This also means that you’ll rarely play the same puzzle twice. Every puzzle will introduce a new type of obstacle or power-up. The design of each puzzle will change as well. Sometimes there will be holes in the honeycomb design, or even bottlenecks. At times, it can feel like you’re at the mercy of the tiles, but thinking strategically and not worrying about the clock can often overcome the challenge.

The story, combined with the short-term goals of finding new items and power-ups, will keep you playing. Rarely have we ever played a puzzle game to experience a story, but Azkend 2 constantly surprised us with its attention to detail and cleverly-crafted game experience.

It may have a funny name, but Azkend 2 isn’t anything to laugh at. It has plenty of variety, gorgeous art, and tremendous music, making it a gaming gem for anyone fond of puzzle games and paperback adventure novels.

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The fine folks at Milkbag games have released Sidewords. A fun little diversion of a word game that is the devil child of crosswords and scrabble. For each level in the game the grid must be completed to win the level — this means that each letter at the top and side must be used. And not just the top or side, but each word must be made up of letters from the top and side to create a grid. It’s a pain, but in the right kind of way. Even the simplest of the levels can be a head scratcher until you get used to the game. Well worth the $3 as a diversion while we wait for Milkbag to finally release Snow Siege.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math.

It’s not always easy to tear your kids away from their tablets and make them do something edifying. Thankfully, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math relieves you of this task by turning mathematics into a fun touchscreen video game. Win win!

Aimed at children 3-6 years old, the app makes math fun by ‘gamifying’ it, turning simple mathematics problems into little challenges so that your pre-schooler can learn and play at the same time.

There are more than two dozen mini-games, split across three categories: Numbers, Shapes and Measurements, and Add and Subtract. According to the developer the difficulty of these puzzles is adaptive too, so kids of any ability can be both encouraged and challenged.

Mini Dayz has launched and it’s a pixelated 2.5D open world that’s as brutal as the desktop version. In this game, the player is dumped on shore with nothing. They must scavenge around for food, water, and weapons while avoiding attack. It’s the kind of game where the goal is to stay alive as long as possible. But that will never be very long. It’s oddly free and seems to only have an ad on the main screen — for now.

Pewter Games has brought their charming point and click adventure The Little Acre to iOS. It’s an amazingly beautiful animated adventure set in a sort of hybrid magical / alien world. A great all ages adventure and very fun.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, The House of Da Vinci by Blue Brain Games. There’s a reason Leonardo Da Vinci is the only renaissance figure who routinely shows up in video games you know. With his remarkable inventiveness and genius for creative problem-solving, Da Vinci was a gamer through and through. He was just born 500 hundred years too soon. Thankfully, there are studios like Blue Brain Games to bring him to life in videogame form. The House of Da Vinci, which comes to us courtesy of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, is a puzzler that seeks to channel the artistry and innovation of its title character.

You play as one of Da Vinci’s more promising apprentices, and you have the challenging task of trying to work out where the hell he’s gone. Was he assassinated by the church? Who knows. Has he quietly gone into a retirement? Perhaps. Did he accidentally invent a shrink ray and shrink himself down to the size of an dustmite? Probably not. Da Vinci’s workshop looks beautiful, thanks to some impressive 3D graphics, and the in-game environment is crammed with all the elaborate machines and crazy inventions you’d expect to find in the workplace of a renaissance genius.(more…)

Poly Bridge is out now on iOS, and it’s good to have it! It’s a great game and many seem to agree that it’s the best bridge builder game available. But the iOS versions, so far, is missing the sandbox mode. I would hope that it’s coming soon in an update. If you are all interested in physics puzzlers, grab this one. (Note: the video is for the PC version, I have yet to see a trailer for the mobile version, the developer Dry Cactus isn’t that great at marketing…)

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